The Squid Jo Castle The first time the floods came, they hit Mum’s homemade soap workshop, and we were all horribly clean for months. I grew to hate the smell of verbena. The second time, I was at school. It was a dark Thursday afternoon, and we had double Physics. Something about radiation was on the board, and me and Jim Reed were interlocked in a furious battle royale of tic-tac-toe. I’m certain he cheated. When I voiced my outrage, Mr Redmond stepped forward to admonish me-and then frowned. There was a delicate splish at his foot, and his frown lines communicated in Morse code his regret at forgetting his wellies that day. Our area was flat and near-ish the sea, so we were naturally vulnerable to floods, or something. However, two in a month was previously unheardof. It was a big inconvenience for everybody really. But life goes on. After the second, we all assumed the tides were done with their generosity, and continued as usual. The third flood came when I was walking along the beach. I’m no villain, no miscreant teenager who likes to desecrate public places with graffiti and litter and such. I wasn’t on the beach for a bit of old-fashioned rebellion, just a stretch of the legs. I had a couple of shells in my pocket, and sand in my shoes. Soon I had a small pond in both. I saw the sea once roll and tickle my soles, and I’d assumed I’d meandered over to the shore unwittingly. Then it was at my waist. Our beach was no gorgeous desktop-wallpaper lagoon; the salty slew of silt rolled over and swamped me before I got the common sense to run. Some seaweed fluttered past my face like an ugly, foul-smelling butterfly. It occurred to me I was choking, and the water had swarmed into every sort of oxygen port I had, as well as my ears. It played a wobbly, thrashing soundtrack, my struggling arms cymbal crashes and the pounding of my feet trying to find floor a feeble bassline. Even if the flood sirens sounded above, I couldn’t have heard them. I dreamed up help - perhaps passers-by had watched my head vanish under the rolling wave and flung out a rope, desperately crying out- “Sir!” or, perhaps, “Oliver!”, if they were people I knew. I saw no rope. I couldn’t really see anything.
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