By Stella Fenwick
I’m here, so I make my mum proud and win brownie points with unsympathetic careers advisors. Here, there’s a girl I think I’m friends with and a job I think I’ll take. But the old me is still back at my old house, still waiting to become an artist with the freedom of a fresh, white canvas.
Here, we won’t need artists soon. Here, the new me looks for otters in the river and avoids the tower of the Cathedral – though I wonder if I can see the old me from up there. There, I sleep like an ammonite.
Here, I’m walking home from a lecture while a flood wraps me in white sheets of rain, and water pipes burst under Silver Street for the second time this week, and my chest swells and pounds with dread for the climate I’m about to graduate in.
And I’m thinking of the old house, with the wildflowers that tremble around my ankles as I stand on my bed and button up the end of the duvet cover, and the families that still remember the coal mine or the Cold War bunker which they knocked down to make an empty field freckled with crows.
And while thinking of these things I have lost since giving up my childhood bedroom to the promise of this new chapter, a woman with white hair and trembling hands calls me into her house as I walk past.
“Help me paint,” she says, “I can’t reach the ceiling.”
The ceiling is low, skimming the top of my head, but she’s right, her weak arms can’t wade against the current of her body. The ceiling is brown and dirty, while the rest of the room is still glistening with white paint. My wet shoes wheep onto her white wooden floors, but it is calm in here, washed up on the riverbank of Saddler Street, and when she shuts the door behind me, the flood and the hot, wet wind go silent, kneeling at her doorstep.
She watches me paint above my head. We speak no more to each other, we just look at a bus sailing past, lifted from the tarmac from the anger of the brown cascade, tottering in a new suspension above the world, sweeping past swollen flower beds in the marketplace which are overflowing into the foaming gulp of the tide.
An hour later and the rain that soaked my shoulders is now replaced with drops of fallen paint. I kneel on her doormat to wash the paintbrush in the river that has settled into the concrete valley and continues to flow. The sun is peeking out from behind a cloud so pregnant with rain it’s more black than grey – but I’m grateful that at least the rain has stopped, even if it is with an eggshell dam. Here, we always wait for the next extreme (heat, cold or wet) to slap us in the face.
A man is walking past and watching me bowed here. The water is over his ankles and his jeans are clinging to the shapes of his concealed legs. He smiles and I smile too. The woman takes the brush and shuts the door behind me without a word. I know I am to wade through the stream towards an essay which waits for me at my flat. But right now it is only me and the man, and we stand like a heron and an egret, surveying how the world looks when reflected back at us from our feet. Everyone else found somewhere to shelter before the flood with a practiced swiftness, except a duck which settles into the current below me.
The man squats down and smiles at me again, this time like a child, mischievous. He sweeps a shower of water from his ankles and it hits me in the face. The paint melts from my shoulders. It is so cold. I squat down and soak him back.
I turn to see the old woman in her white home. She’s painting the glass of her windows white. She looks back at me briefly before sweeping a swollen brush over her eyes like a geisha’s oshiroi.
I’m here yet I’m thinking of the ways that the flood is being cupped by my old house, how much water the roof must be letting in, how my old cat must be watching new ducks land in the basin of the pub car park. I’m wondering whether the water around me has travelled in one great, country-spanning torrent from that doorstep there to my ankles here.
I wonder if there can affect me all the way over here.
Then another explosion of water hits me in the face and stings my eyes. The man is snickering, and the ripples created by his wading legs bob against my shins. He steps up into the sports shop and disappears into its shadows.
Durham is a new chapter in a book that is soon closing. I am going home to fill the white sheets of my essay while the flood drains.
Image credit: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Illustration by: Madison Neal
